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How To Be: Jason Vorhees (From Multiversus) (In 4e D&D)

In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:

This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character

This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise

While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible

The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic

When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.

Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.

Heavy breathing.

More heavy breathing.

No actual words.

Just even more heavy breathing.

Aiiiiiiiieeeeeee!

Jason, In Summary

I’ve never watched a Jason Vorhees movie, which is fine, because it doesn’t matter. He is a big scary weirdo in a mask, from a series of slasher movies, which is why he’s got a cartoony monster man version in a videogame that’s about having goofy fun fights between your Adventure Time and Scooby Doo action figures.

Hm.

Anyway, setting aside the fundamental weirdness at the heart of our brand-driven society that has resulted in the House of Zaslav material known now as Best Relaunched Game Ever, Multiversus, it’s an opportunity to see an existing character reinterpreted in a still-threatening but gentler representation in a funny cartoon fight-game narrative. It’s a way to do a slasher movie monster, but it doesn’t involve a big budget for wet materials.

Jason Vorhees is Some Guy, possibly a zombie, possibly a curse, who died (or didn’t) at a summer camp, and then spent his time hunting and killing campers at the same camp, which didn’t somehow completely shut down that camp, or whatever, which I am sure, if you ask me to watch those movies, I will blame on capitalism. Point is that Jason Vorhees is a force of nature, a murder beast that walks like a man and serves as a sort of genre centrepoint for ‘slasher movie monster mans,’ along with Michael Myers, is a vague outline of an identity. That gives us negative space to work with making this kind of character, which is pretty good:

Jason is big, so probably not a Halfling or Goblin or Kobold

Jason is tough, so probably a defender

Jason hits people in melee with a knife or axe or some other suitably nasty weapon that kills them, because…

Jason is very strong

The Prequels

Now, with that outlaid as our negative space, it’s time to look at the vibes that Jason puts out.

Option 1 is that he’s a big tough guy and he’s scary because he’s very strong. This is the simplest version of who he is, just a big asshole who kills people. What makes him scary in his context is that he’s a grown adult and he’s hunting children. The idea of just outscaling and out-threatening your opponents is a fine place to start. Option 2 is that he’s the kind of spooky monster guy who teleports around and appears around people just in time to murderlate them. And then there’s option 3, which is more a conversation about the horror story attached to a person, a kind of magical ideal that is why he can go to space and drown people in liquid oxygen.

Something about all of these builds that you’re going to have to grapple with for your own choices is the way that Jason is a character with almost nothing going on. There’s room to interpret stuff, but Jason as a person has no hobbies, no personal interests, maybe some modest trauma, but nothing that you could meaningfully consider as a personality that informs other interests and skills.

I can think of a few things that kind of ‘work’ for his secondary interests – the places you build the skills out of – where he could be seen as some kind of woodsman or hunter, someone who spends a lot of time in the outback foraging for food (if he needs it) and hanging out with animals. I could imagine a sort of Ranger package there, which gives a modest direction for the types of builds he could have.

Most importantly, you want to remember, you’re going to be playing a character inspired by Jason. Jason Vorhees is a cipher of a character, a bad consequence that happens to people, and you can work with that, you can happen to people. What you don’t want to do though is create a character who can’t do anything but happen to people. You need to be able to hold a conversation, you need to be able to engage with people, and you need to have something to do when you’re not killing people. The bulk of the game engine handles combat; you need to make sure you’re handling everything else.

Class is going to inform a lot of that!

Build 1 – Fighter

If you want to focus on the ‘scary dude’ element.

Good news: This works out of the box. Big weapon, heavy armour, move like a slightly threatening brick and just make sure to close on people and mess them up. Jason as exists kinda already works like a fighter in combat in that he’s not subtle or stealthy, he’s not prone to demonstrating any kind of wit or cunning in how he sneaks up on people. He just appears where people aren’t expecting and messes them up, which is, largely, pretty easy when he’s hunting down people who are, for lack of a better term, pretty stupid.

Decent, it’ll do.

Build 2 – Knight

If you want to focus on the teleportation.

That Jason teleports seems to be an interesting byproduct of a medium shift. When you’re dealing with a movie, you can always just use cuts or body doubles to make someone capable of moving too fast for an actual human body to transfer. This is a way that movies play with time, where a character can sneak up on someone while a moment is held for longer than that movie even existed – a character can be paralysed in place looking at a corpse and the actual time that takes is much shorter.

But as an effect of that, Jason is represented as teleporting around. Teleporting is a thing you can either do really easily in D&D 4e or it’s hard to get your hands on. For example, if you only want to teleport at all you can take a Tiefling, at level 10 take the feat Secrets of Belial, and then use that to take Ethereal Sidestep. That’s an at-will move-action teleport, and you can use items like Eladrin Armour, Gloves of Dimensional Repulsion, or an Eladrin Ring of Passage to turn teleport 1 to teleport 5. This means that almost anyone can be a fairly fast-moving teleporter.

That’s okay, and it’s neat for ways to use teleportation, and we’ve talked about teleportation at length when we talked about Dishonored’s characters. Thing with that is that’s an enormous amount of effort and when you build the whole character around them. It also makes it hard to be a Defender.

Here’s the much, much simpler build: Take a knight. Get your first magical weapon as a Staff of the Traveller. Beat people with this magic axe-handle. Take the Hammer-Hands stance, and then every time you whallop someone you get to kick them a square (which trust me, you’ll be able to do more with it as you level up) and then teleport next to where they land.

The Knight is never the best option for anything but it is simple and if what you want is a character who is simple and spends their time hitting people with a stick, teleporting into people’s spaces and beating them to death with a big weapon you hold in two hands like a quarterstaff, then this build is a place to start.

Build 3 – Paladin

If you want to focus on the scary story.

For me, I think the most interesting idea in the space of ‘Basically Jason Vorhees,’ is the idea of a character who has this fearsome ghost story attached to them. Jason wears a mask, there’s a way to make that kind of thing a sort of transforming character – that normally, you’re dealing with a Paladin who’s travelling around with a ghostly monster story attached to them. They don the mask, they let the devil out, and the player can create a strict, hard binary between their terrible slasher monster side and their Actually Able To Buy A Packet Of Chips side.

I think this idea is the coolest way to play with Jason Vorhees in a way that lets you play a character who is functional and normal, and even maybe doesn’t betray the scary elements of the character, then have that horror element burst free once the character commits to action. If you want a tank type that works on pursuit based mechanics, this is a rare chance to take the out-the-box Player’s Handbook Paladin and lean in to Combat Challenge.

Divine Challenge is normally a problem for tank types. It requires you to spend your turns closing on your enemy. Since the Paladin is also given heavy armour options, there’s this tension where a Paladin may be stuck spending chunks of turn trying to chase someone down in the battle that they’re not able to catch up with. That tension point needs to be resolved for a Paladin Jason: you need to find a way to make your character tough and able to absorb damage, you need to make sure they’re mobile enough to chase enemies, and you need to make sure that your enemy violating your challenge has a reason to care about it.

For being tough without armour, I recommend Virtue. Virtue is bonkers. If Virtue was a level 6 utility power, I would say ‘yeah, that seems about right.’ Virtue is a well-established and very well-loved Paladin utility power, which rewards you for bolstering the size of your healing surges to give yourself a huge chunk of temporary hit points. Amplifying Virtue could be an essay unto itself, but for quick and dirty builds that want to fire it off and walk around with a huge pile of hit points protecting them, check out the Amulet Of Life. The Amulet of Life means that when you fire Virtue, you can spend two surges and get temporary hit points equal to half your starting hit points, which is not a small amount.

You also need a good Charisma, to make Divine Challenge worth having. As a strength-based Paladin, you have the opportunity to take Mighty Challenge, which means your Jason will focus on one attacking stat and do more damage when they violate the Challenge.

Finally, one of the best ways to at a low level amplify your mobility and damage in conjunction when you need to chase an opponent down, you need to make sure you can charge. That suggests Ardent Strike or Virtuous Strike as one of your at-will attacks.

Now, if you’re at all familiar with how Paladins work, you might realise that this whole conjunction involves picking up one feat, one utility power, and one at-will power, and that holds together all the elements we need to make this Jason build work. The thing is, there’s other stuff Paladins do well, like the great big hit Blood of the Mighty, a notorious hard hitting melee attack that with a little help lets you spike an enemy out of existence in the low levels, like, again, a slasher villain.

This build makes very few demands out of just ‘melee Paladin,’ and the only real thing you miss is that you’re building for Strength, Healing Surges, and without heavy armour. These things are not hard to ask for, they are not unreasonable choices to make, and if you stick within this framework it isn’t going to be hard to continue making your Jason a bigger and scarier threat.

Oh, weapon wise? I recommend going for the hatchet, a woodcutter’s axe just sitting on the back of your travelling paladin, a weapon they ask people to don’t touch that, please. Carry around a defending weapon as your ‘real’ weapon, and you get a shield and a weapon!

Junk Drawer

I swear I cannot actually generate any kind of excuse to make a druid build for this guy. Most of the things you can do to make Jason feel more appropriate to the Multiversus build involve dual wielding, hybrid builds or multiclassing.

Conclusion

There’s nothing that complicated about what Jason is or wants to be, if you’re willing to consider what it is you really want out of the Weirdo In A Mask. Try and do it all, and you’re going to struggle doing any of them. But if you pick the thing that matters to you, you can focus a build around a thing easily and get a lot of options for what you do with the rest of the characters.

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#How to Be #Games #4e #4e dnd #dnd #jason voorhees

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